, and the boys are bones.
Poplar? This isn't Poplar. I feel like Robinson Crusoe--only I can't
find a footprint in the place."

It is for the young to remember there is no decay, though change,
sometimes called progress, resembles it, especially when your work is
finished and you are only waiting and looking on. When Captain Tom is
in that mood we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead. It will be high tide
if we are in luck, and the sun will be going down to give our River
majesty, and a steamer will be backing into the stream, outward bound.
The quiet of a fine evening for Tom, and the great business of ships
and the sea for me. We see the steamer's captain and its pilot leaning
over the bridge, looking aft towards the River. I think the size of
their vessel is a little awful to Tom. He never had to guide so many
thousand tons of steel and cargo into a crowded waterway. But those
two young fellows above know nothing of the change; they came with it.
They are under their spell, thinking their world, as once Tom did his,
established and permanent. They are keeping easy pace with the
movement, and so do not know of it. Tom, now at rest, sitting on a
pierhead bollard, sees the world leaving him, going ahead past his
cogitating tobacco smoke. Let it go. We, watching quietly from our
place on the pier-head, are wiser than the moving world in one respect.
We know it does not know whence it is moving, nor why. Well, perhaps
its presiding god, who is determined the world shall go round, would be
foolish to tell us.

The sun has dropped behind the black serration of the western city.
Now the River with all the lower world loses substance, becomes
vaporous and unreal. Moving so fast then? But the definite sky
remains, a hard dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders of iron
clouds. The heaven alone is trite and plain. The wharves, the
factories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of hope and
industry, merge into a dim spectral show in which a few lights burn,
fumbling with ineffectual beams in dissolution. Out on the River a
dark body moves past; it has bright eyes, and hoots dismally as it goes.

There is a hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, and
had stopped moving. But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a
gigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe,
and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. Yet the hum of the steam
is too subdued a sound i